I guess you already know this, but the monkey family have tails, and the ape family doesn’t (unless he’s a Barbary Macaque [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_macaque ] but that’s obviously doubtful).
Which brings me to the question of what kind of “monkey” Monkian actually is? My guess, unsurprisingly, is that he’s some sort of ‘mutant’ gorilla [pun intended].
Yeah yeah I know, none of the TCs have tails either (or Jackalman for that matter) - and “Apeman” just doesn’t have a nice ring to it either. It seems only Slithe - and Snarf - has one [which they both use] as far as I know.
Any thoughts guys?
Hmmm… interesting. He does look a bit like a Japanese Snow Monkey or a Baboon, but I doubt if the designers really focused on only one type of monkey. They probably took the interesting features of a number of primates and came up with the design.
Similarly, I don’t think that Slithe was modelled on a single creature. He also looks like an amalgam of a number of different reptiles.
As far as tails go, I think Ma-mutt and Mongor had a small tuft of a tail and Ratar-O had one as well. The animators probably found it unnecessary and cumbersome to animate tails and thus left them out for most characters, unless the character actually used it (as you correctly pointed out for Slithe and Snarf). Animators always try to make the character designs as simple as possible so as to reduce their workload. That is why many cartons, especially older ones like Mickey, Donald etc. only have 4 fingers instead of 5.